This post gives you a sneak peek into one of my private mastermind sessions, where I’m joined by an amazing community of seven-, eight- and nine-figure brand owners seeking to scale their ecommerce businesses.
In this particular session, I shared the results from an important A/B test that we ran on oVertone.
Many A/B tests have ho-hum results, but this one? This test won by a huge margin and had a significant impact on our business. Even better, it’s a strategy you can replicate on your ecommerce site to increase your average order value (AOV).
Let’s get into it.
The Hypothesis
Our hypothesis for this test was that adding multiple reward thresholds will increase our AOV.
The idea is pretty simple: we thought we could get people to place bigger orders by incentivizing them to spend a little more to earn extra rewards, like:
- Free shipping
- Discounts
- And free products
Now, let’s take a look at how we implemented this in the cart.
The Test
Previously, we had a simple cart slider that offered a single reward — free shipping — when you reached a certain spending threshold. See “Control” in the image below.
For this test, we created a new multi-threshold cart slider with 4 different rewards, including free shipping and free products at strategic price points. See “Variant.”
Here’s what they each looked like:
Hopefully, you can see how the new design creates more motivation for shoppers to add more items to their cart. It can even trigger feelings of FOMO, because people don’t want to miss out on savings or free products.
Here’s another example of a multi-threshold slider by the guys at Carpe:
They set up their slider to apply a bigger discount as you add more products to your cart. Personally I don’t like this approach, because I’m not trying to give a 30% discount. It’s often a lot more affordable for business owners to give free products rather than big discounts.
Incidentally, Carpe also includes upsells in between the cart items and the checkout button, which is another interesting approach that might be worth testing:
So we tested these two reward sliders against one another, and here’s what we discovered.
The Results
This test won by a BIG margin, sending us a clear message: the right incentives, delivered the right way, can drive bigger purchases.
This is a strategy you can implement in your ecommerce store, too. And based on our results — I suggest you test it sooner rather than later.
3 Things to Keep in Mind for Your Shopping Cart Slider
If you do test a multi-threshold slider in your cart, here are a few considerations to keep in mind:
Do what makes sense for your business.
As you saw above, Carpe offers up to a 30% off discount—which might not be affordable for you, depending on your costs and margins. It could be that offering free products instead might have a smaller impact on AOV, but results in more profit at the end of the day. So do what makes sense for your business.
There are various ways to implement this.
I’m sure there are Shopify apps that allow you to set up a slider like this. But you can also hard-code it using Shopify scripts, which is what we did. Shopify scripts are so sophisticated now that it’s pretty easy to add something like this.
Choose your threshold levels strategically.
People tend to look at AOV as a blended, average number. But the truth is, you usually have chunks of purchases at different thresholds. Find those chunks so you can make your reward thresholds just a little higher to encourage people to spend more than they otherwise would.
For instance, maybe you get a lot of purchases around $45 because that’s the cost of your best-selling item. So in this case, consider setting a reward threshold at $50. When shoppers realize they’re only $5 away from a free bonus, they’ll feel compelled to add another small item to their cart.
Now get out there and start testing your cart slider!
